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The Beauty of Jesus 

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BIBLICAL CRITICISM 
AND PREACHING 



BY 

GEORGE ELLIOTT 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 






Copyright, 1912, by 
GEORGE ELLIOTT 



£CI.A320988 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Foreword . < 7 

Transition and Trial 9 

Preacher and Preaching 10 

The Crisis Is Not Novel 13 

The Peril of Freedom 15 

Critic and Dogmatist 17 

The Preacher's Danger 19 

The Rights of Ignorance 21 

The Rights of Intelligence 25 

A Negative Duty 29 

The Danger of Dogmatism 31 

Positive Gains to Faith 36 

The Moral Gain 40 

The Apologetic Gain 42 

Criticism Justified • • • * 4 

The Pulpit and Intellectual Liberty 49 

Authority and Inspiration 52 

Divine and Human 60 

The Highest Criticism 71 

The Purpose of Preaching 76 

The Need of the Ministry 81 

Results to the Church and Individual 86 

Conclusion 9 ^ 



A FOREWORD 

This is primarily a message from a 
preacher to preachers. I do not pro- 
fess to be an expert in the higher or 
any other sort of criticism, but am 
not without knowledge of the main 
conclusions of modern biblical scholar- 
ship. I am convinced that the Chris- 
tian minister must take account of 
these results in the work of the pulpit, 
not so much as homiletical material as 
forming a new atmosphere in which 
his message is delivered. Ibsen puts a 
profound saying in the mouth of one 
of his characters: "The eye, born 
anew, transforms the old action/ J 
May I hope that the following brief 
study of the situation may prove a 
tonic to the timid and an anodyne to 



8 FOREWORD 

the audacious? I trust it may also be 
of use in stilling the tumult in the 
minds and hearts of many perplexed 
but loyal laymen. 

G. E. 



BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND 
PREACHING 

Transition and Trial 
All times of theological transition 
are times of trial to the Church and 
of testing to its teaching, and in all 
such times the brunt of the battle 
must be borne by the Christian min- 
ister, for it is he who must bring the 
new truth to the touch of life. The 
final assay of the ore digged up by the 
scientific investigator in the mines of 
religious history must be made by the 
preacher. This is preeminently true of 
the problems raised by the critical re- 
construction of biblical history and lit- 
erature. How far has the message of 
the Bible become obsolete through the 
change of attitude as to its origin and 
structure? Has its spiritual force as 
an aid in right living been in any way 

9 



10 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

diminished? These are questions 
which the minister must meet, and 
upon his intelligent loyalty in answer- 
ing them will depend the religious life 
of the Christian Church in the coming 
generation. 

Preacher and Preaching 
Christian preaching is still the chief 
external source of religious knowledge 
to the people. The Bible itself is a 
means of grace most largely through 
the public proclamation of its message 
from the pulpit. As Coleridge states 
it: "The preacher is the point of 
junction between the spoken word and 
the Church, the sensible voice of the 
Holy Spirit." 1 He is "steward of the 
mysteries of God." The prevalence of 
the printed page has hardly lessened 
the power of uttered truth. It is still 
by the "foolishness of preaching" that 
God proposes to save man. Like the 
prophet of old, the preacher is God's 

literary Remains (Notes on Donne). 



AND PREACHING 11 

spokesman, and the pulpit is the 
tribune from which the divine oracles 
are made known. 

The Bible is therefore preeminently 
the preacher's book. It is in truth the 
literary prolongation of the prophetic 
vision and message and of the apos- 
tolic testimony and teaching. In their 
call and consecration he finds the 
genesis of his office, and the sermon is 
but the living continuation and de- 
velopment of the sacred message that 
they delivered. He must be so sat- 
urated with the contents and spirit of 
the Book that he shall become a living 
Bible. The ideal of the preacher is 
well portrayed in the words spoken by 
Lamartine of the young Bossuet: "The 
child became a prophet. Such he was 
born and such he was as he grew to 
manhood, lived and died, the Bible 
transfused into a man." 

The Christian preacher, however, 
exercises other functions than those of 
the Hebrew prophet. To the prophetic 



12 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

office he must add the work of the 
teacher. He must be both seer and 
scholar. It is the separation of these 
functions made necessary by the grow- 
ing complexity of truth and life which 
has in large measure created the antago- 
nism between criticism and orthodoxy. 
Theoretical scholarship has been in 
part divorced from practical piety. 
The professor and the preacher see 
the truth of God from a very different 
standpoint. The Christian scholar 
has, indeed, a sacred ministry to per- 
form, but it is one quite subordinate 
to the proclamation of the evangel of 
Christ. The aim of the student is 
truth for its own sake; the aim of the 
preacher is the realization of truth in 
personality. It will therefore be the 
preacher,' and not the professor, who 
must say the final word; for the appeal 
to life, to spiritual reality, is the final 
test of truth itself. The pulpit and the 
chair need each other; the former 
needs to gain the courage and loyalty 



AND PREACHING 13 

to truth born of scientific method, and 
the latter the practical sense and 
vital atmosphere of the evangelistic 
passion. The battle will be over and 
peace will come when the preacher 
finds out that the results of critical 
study have a real value for life, and 
the professor that truth in its whole- 
ness cannot be discovered or live in 
the intellectual vacuum from which the 
vital air of feeling has been pumped by 
the reason. The appeal to life will 
save the scholar from academic narrow- 
ness, and the scientific method will 
preserve the preacher from dogmatism. 

The Crisis Is Not Novel 
There is really nothing novel in the 
situation. The Church has met sim- 
ilar crises again and again, and in 
every case has found the gain greater 
than the loss. She met the reflective 
thought of Greece and assimilated its 
philosophy into the great Catholic 
creeds; she met the institutional genius 



14 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

of Rome and won from it an external 
organism by which she survived the 
political chaos of the Dark Ages; she 
met the humanism of the Renaissance 
and transformed its spirit into the 
Protestant Reformation; she met the 
invasion of physical science and found 
fresh illustration of spiritual truth. A 
little knowledge of religious history 
would serve to allay our alarm and to 
inspire courage in the present crisis. 

The preacher, as Schiller says of the 
poet, should be the child, but not the 
slave, of his age. Because preaching 
is a message out of life and to life, he 
must be in touch with the time-spirit 
while he feels the breath of the Eternal 
Spirit. If he wants to make the Book 
of God live for modern uses, he must 
take counsel of all learning that throws 
any light upon its origin and structure 
or may find any fresh light in its mes- 
sage. It is a great joy to the true 
minister of the mysteries of God to 
breathe the stimulating air of an age 



AND PREACHING 15 

that analyzes rather than systema- 
tizes. Preaching has become a harder 
but more vital task; it is an adventure 
into an uncharted sea, full of possible 
peril, but also alive with the promise 
of fresh discovery, of new continents of 
truth rising out of the dangerous deep. 
He need not fear that any new realms 
added to human hope and experience 
will fail to inherit the wealth of the 
lands left behind in his journeying. 
He will, rather, realize Jesus's descrip- 
tion of the scribe who is well instructed 
in the kingdom, 1 who knows how to 
give continuous life to both the new 
and the old, and who out of the in- 
exhaustible treasure hoard of truth 
brings to his people new meanings in 
the old teaching, and shows the old 
life burgeoning and blossoming in the 
fresh beauty of new statement. 

The Peril of Freedom 
The problem raised by the critical 
position is real, and must not be ig- 

l Matt. 13. 52. 



16 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

nored or denied. All freedom has its 
dangers. He who has confused his 
faith with ceremonialism will feel the 
foundations going when forms of wor- 
ship are discarded, and those who have 
confounded trust in a living Person 
with acquiescence in a verbal formula 
may surrender their hope when the 
formulas are abandoned. These are 
dangers to weak and timid rather 
than to strong and brave souls. It 
needed all the logical genius and ethi- 
cal enthusiasm of Paul to save his 
doctrine of justification from being the 
occasion of antinomian folly. But it 
must always be remembered that this 
panic and consequent peril have been 
chiefly created, not by the critics, but 
by their opponents, by a traditional- 
ism which has produced a pattern of 
piety resting upon human opinion 
rather than upon the revelation of 
God. A religion had at second-hand 
through the medium of any visible 
authority must be shaken and fall 



AND PREACHING 17 

when its basis of authority is discred- 
ited. A devout but ignorant Roman- 
ist woman, who broke the china 
crucifix which she was accustomed to 
use in her devotions, cried in dismay, 
"Now I have nothing but the great 
God to trust in!" The relations of 
God to the soul of man must not be 
entangled with any human traditions 
or any external authority. The 
preacher or teacher who does this is 
worse than a bungler who daubs with 
untempered mortar in the building of 
character; he is a false prophet who 
has perverted the gospel by overlay- 
ing it with the traditions of men. 

Critic and Dogmatist 
But the critics themselves have not 
been without blame in this matter. 
They have not all been men of richly 
endowed spiritual natures. It is the 
unfortunate accident of history that 
this new intellectual discipline was 
exploited at the first by rationalistic 



18 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

theologians, who corrupted critical 
methods by mixing with them un- 
critical presuppositions born of a priori 
speculative theories. Much of the 
mischief has been wrought by this 
mixture of philosophical with his- 
torical and literary criticism. In mak- 
ing this admission it must also be 
remembered that an uncritical dog- 
matism has itself been largely 
responsible for the creation of 
rationalism, and that the latter ren- 
ders a real service when it aids in 
destroying an unspiritual tradition- 
alism. The iconoclast is never wholly 
wise; he often destroys many a lovely 
form of the past which might well be 
spared. His hammer is apt to fall with 
little discrimination upon a hideous 
Mumbo, Jumbo and a lovely Apollo 
Belvedere. Yet the work even of 
the negative critic may be of the 
highest value; such criticism is a 
cleansing fire which cannot but refine 
the gold of Divine Revelation while 



AND PREACHING 19 

consuming its dross. Just as proud 
Egypt endowed departing Israel with 
her wealth, so will even an uridevout 
scholarship be compelled to put its 
treasures of learning at the service of 
supernatural religion. Criticism needs 
transplanting from the frigid climate 
where it has grown into the warmer 
region of evangelical faith. For its 
highest service it demands spiritual 
insight and sympathy, even as art 
criticism requires aesthetic feeling. 
Yet that artist would be very foolish 
who refused to learn from the pro- 
fessors of optics and acoustics on the 
ground that many of them had shown 
deficient perception of artistic beauty. 

The Preacher's Danger 
Here emerges a supreme danger of 
the preacher. He is rarely an expert 
in any one department of theological 
training. He is in peril of academic 
pedantry on the one hand and of 
shallow sciolism on the other. The 



20 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

silly pretense of omniscience and in- 
tellectual superiority, the itch for 
novelty, and the longing to be hailed 
as an "advanced thinker," affecta- 
tion of up-to-dateness and modernity, 
the premature exploitation of undi- 
gested erudition and unseasoned theo- 
ries — these are some of the ways in 
which the pulpit has discredited the 
patient toil of the professor and 
aroused unworthy suspicion of the 
true spirit and character of the new 
learning. Nothing could be more 
sterile than such a ministry. As 
Hatch has shown, the modern preacher 
is too often the successor of the Greek 
sophist rather than of the New Testa- 
ment prophet. 1 Such preachers per- 
vert the very purpose of the pulpit. 
While the sermon must take cogni- 
zance of all science, real preaching is 
pre-scientific; like poetry and litera- 
ture, it deals with concrete realities, 
not with intellectual formulas or logi- 

1 Hibb&Pi Lectures, 1888, iv. 



AND PREACHING 21 

cal abstractions. To be instructive it 
must be constructive and not destruc- 
tive. It has primarily to deal with 
spiritual certainties, not with critical 
negations or human opinions. To 
make the analysis of the Pentateuch, 
the partition of Isaiah, the date of 
Daniel, or the synoptic problem the 
theme of that piece of sacred rhetoric 
we call the sermon is to prostitute the 
positiveness of the prophetic message: 
the preacher has become a phono- 
graph of earthly theories and is no 
longer the spokesman of the Eternal. 
The true work of the critical method, 
which is to free scholarship from dog- 
matism, has failed in such a minister; 
he is still the victim of the vicious 
intellectualism from which he imagines 
he has escaped. 

The Rights of Ignorance 
Moreover, the minister's conscience 
is not scientific but pastoral. He has 
the care of souls and can never forget 



22 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

the needs of his flock, the weak and 
timid as well as the strong and ma- 
ture. He will never go out of his way 
to gratuitously insult a conventional 
belief. He knows that many institu- 
tions and ideas have won a sanctity by 
their association with the holiest ex- 
periences. He will not wantonly at- 
tack such reverences until he has 
given more worthy objects of devotion. 
He will not take away the cripple's 
crutches until he has taught him to 
walk without them. Nor will he re- 
sort to brutal methods to disillusion 
souls of their dear delusions. He will 
never, schoolboy-like, set off fireworks 
just to make a sensation and wake up 
folks. The Christian congregation is 
made up of a heterogeneous audience. 
There are the old, whose habits of 
thought are crystallized and cannot 
be broken up without much mental 
and moral distress; there are the 
young, who still need scholastic drill 
and are ill prepared for the subtleties 



AND PREACHING 23 

of science. It is a terrible thing to 
lose old reverence while new knowl- 
edge is being acquired. It is a delicate 
and difficult task to guide souls 
through times of transition and to 
save from wasting the wine of the 
kingdom while we are being compelled 
to change the pattern of the bottles! 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell, 
That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music as before. 1 

This duty of caution and considera- 
tion for the rights of the unlearned 
involves a moral danger. Courage and 
candor are the very soul of the pro- 
phetic spirit, and they must not be 
killed by cowardly caution. The grav- 
est suspicion in which the modern 
pulpit is involved is that of intellec- 
tual dishonesty. Care must be taken 
that the noble reticence of a loving 
tenderness for the timid is not mis- 
taken for, or does not become, an 

1 Tennyson, "In Memoriam." 



24 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

ignoble reserve as to the royalty of 
truth itself. Yet this caution is com- 
manded by our very loyalty to truth; 
it is the very essence of the scientific 
spirit to combine caution with cour- 
age — caution in its method and 
courage in accepting the farthest con- 
sequences of that method. It is not 
dishonest to utter opinions with re- 
serve and convictions with assurance; 
it is not uncandid to be silent about 
tentative conclusions which in the 
very nature of the case are subject to 
revision. We are to declare the whole 
counsel of God, but not necessarily 
the whole result of scholarship, and 
certainly not the detailed processes by 
which its positive results are reached. 
To bring the methods of the library 
and laboratory into the pulpit would 
painfully puzzle not only the weak 
brother, but also the strong folk of the 
congregation. The preacher will do 
well to have an efficient smoke- 
consumer on his thinking engine, lest 



AND PREACHING 25 

he suffocate with the rank vapor of 
his doubts. "Religion," says Carlyle, 
"is not a doubt; it is a certainty or 
else a mockery and a horror. None of 
all the many things we are in doubt 
about, and need to have demonstrated, 
and rendered probable, can by any 
alchemy be made a religion for us, but 
are, and must continue, a baleful, 
quiet or unquiet, hypocrisy for us." 1 

The Rights of Intelligence 
The rights of the unlearned must 
not be so construed as to destroy the 
intellectual dignity of the pulpit. 
There is no alliance between faith and 
ignorance. Intelligent people are quite 
as well worth saving as fools and ig- 
noramuses. The tragedy of the pres- 
ent situation is not only the panic 
that seizes the weak and timid, but 
the "horror of great darkness" which 
has come down upon many people of 
culture and thought. The weak 

^Life of John Sterling, Part I, Chap. XV. 



26 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

brother must not so control the casuis- 
try of the Christian conscience as to 
destroy that liberty in which alone 
noble natures can be nurtured. We 
must not, in consideration for frailty, 
persist in a policy that creates weak- 
lings. The incapacity and unfaithful- 
ness of teachers, which have produced 
spiritual parasitism, must give place 
to a ministry whose message shall 
impart a faith by which man can 
live first-hand from God. A New 
Testament advocate of religious prog- 
ress has put the case in noble words 
of needed warning to those who per- 
sist in giving the milk of the primitive 
platitudes of piety to those who need 
strong meat — "the mature who by 
means of the spiritual gymnastic have 
gained critical insight into moral 
values." 1 ' 

Can a higher critic save souls? 
Certainly, if he has the evangelistic 
spirit. He cannot save them by 

*Heb. 5. 12-14 (a free paraphrase). 



AND PREACHING 27 

higher criticism, no more than the 
theologian can save them by the 
science of dogmatics. But we cer- 
tainly cannot save anyone through any 
protective policy of ignorance. If the 
Church would keep a good conscience, 
she must not only accept the assured 
results of biblical scholarship, but 
allow those results to form the intel- 
lectual atmosphere in which the gos- 
pel is proclaimed. In that atmos- 
phere the men and women of our time 
are actually living. Our appeals to-day 
must be made to minds unlearned in- 
deed in the details of the new teaching, 
but saturated with its spirit, often, 
unfortunately, in its most negative 
forms. There are many souls who 
can best be saved to the kingdom by 
the messenger who has mastered the 
critical method and results. John 
Wilhelm Rountree, the agnostic, tes- 
tified to his conversion to Christianity 
through reading the writings of W. 
Robertson Smith, the prince of mod- 



28 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

ern biblical critics. George James 
Romanes, shivering on the frigid boun- 
dary between pantheism and atheism, 
came to a humble Christian faith 
through the influence of John Gulick, 
the missionary, who was also a Dar- 
winian evolutionist. Greater than 
either, Augustine of Hippo has re- 
corded that profound experience of 
his in which his intellectual revolt at 
the difficulties and even seeming ab- 
surdities of the Scriptures was over- 
come only when the broad-minded and 
tolerant Ambrose showed him the 
spiritual sense, not "of the letter that 
killeth, but the spirit that giveth 
life." 1 If the great African bishop 
had in his hour of darkness fallen into 
the hands of a reactionary or obscuran- 
tist pastor, how different might have 
been all Christian history since! To 
expel science from Christian thinking 
is to try to drive the chariot of salva- 
tion on deflated, if not punctured, 

1 Confessions, Book VI, §6. 



AND PREACHING 29 

tires, and to be hopelessly outdis- 
tanced in the onward rush of things. 

A Negative Duty 

One negative duty is imposed upon 
the preacher by the present situation. 
In intellectual honesty he must not 
use the pulpit to support untenable 
and discredited theories of Holy Scrip- 
ture. The conservative minister, no 
more than the progressive, has the 
right to proclaim any human opin- 
ions as if they were the veritable 
truth of God. He must not use his 
office to disparage the work of devout 
scholars, nor to cruelly and falsely 
brand as heretics and infidels men 
whose loyalty to truth is born of their 
communion with God, and whose con- 
ception of that relationship is fre- 
quently more spiritual than his own. 
He must not disingenuously point out 
the disagreement of critics on uncer- 
tain and disputed matters and wholly 
ignore the vast range of conclusions 



30 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

practically settled by the consensus of 
all experts. If he is a sincere man he 
will not seek to win the plaudits of 
uninstructed piety by the tricks of the 
demagogue and charlatan, or by pas- 
sionate protestations of loyalty to 
the "dear old Book." Nothing has 
more dishonored the sacred records 
than the unworthy honor often shown 
them by men who are willing to pay 
them every possible respect except to 
really study them. The Bible has had 
to endure more at the hands of its 
supposed friends than from all its 
enemies. There is a subtle unbelief 
that underlies all these attempts to 
profanely steady the ark of God. 
There is a calm confidence which 
should possess the soul who has won 
spiritual certainty to which the froth 
and fury of partisan special pleading 
are utterly alien. That besetting vice 
of the oratorical temperament which 
makes the preacher a mere echo of 
popular prejudice must never be al- 



AND PREACHING 31 

lowed to stain the transparent candor 
of the true prophet of God. 

The Danger op Dogmatism 
Nothing is more fatal to the pulpit 
than the spirit of militant dogmatism; 
the temper of the literalist or of intel- 
lectualism is far away from that "sweet 
reasonableness' ' by which divine things 
insinuate themselves into the minds and 
hearts of men. All the hosts of doubt 
and denial are less dangerous to the 
cause of Christ than the traditional- 
ism which has substituted its shriveled 
formulas for the truth of God. Many 
who hold these reactionary views are 
doubtless good and sincere men who 
verily think they are doing God ser- 
vice; but it sometimes requires the 
utmost effort of Christian charity to 
recognize any vital religious experience 
back of the intellect that can conceive 
or the tongue that can express such 
sentiments as "You must choose be- 
tween Christ and the criticism/ ' "If the 



32 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

Bible is not infallible, it is worthless." 
How is it possible that any soul that 
has once caught a glimpse of the self- 
evidencing glory of the faith of Christ 
should be willing to stake all its ex- 
cellence, beauty, and truth upon the 
question of the Mosaic authorship of 
the Levitical system in its complete- 
ness, or the historicity of every detail 
in the book of Chronicles? It is a 
shallow and unimaginative dogmatism, 
making itself the dry-nurse of skepti- 
cism. It would be easy to retort, if 
such persiflage is to be dignified as 
argument, "You must follow Christ 
rather than the Sanhedrin" — for it was 
the rabbinical school that formed the 
traditional idea of Scripture which 
many ignorantly confuse with the 
Word itself. 

Here are some samples of the sort of 
thing which the preacher must avoid 
if he would not make skeptics by the 
score: "The affirmations of Scripture 
of all kinds, whether of spiritual doc- 



AND PREACHING 33 

trine or duty, or of physical or histori- 
cal fact, or of psychological or philo- 
sophical principle, are without any 
error when the ipsissima verba 1 of the 
original autographs are ascertained and 
interpreted in their natural original 
sense. ... A proved error in Scripture 
contradicts not only our doctrine, but 
the Scripture claims, and therefore its 
inspiration in making such claims." 2 
Well did Richard Baxter say, in criti- 
cism of similar theological aberrations 
in his day, "The devil has always been 
a great undoer by overdoing." In the 
chilly air of such a sterile thought 
region sooner or later every flower of 
a true faith must droop and die. It 
is not in such pint-cups of doctrinal 
definition that men can catch and 
measure the tropic rains of God. It is 
not necessary to deny the service ren- 
dered in a former age by such inade- 

1 Evidently, God is not as much interested as these pro- 
fessors in the inerrancy of the "original autographs," or 
he would have providentially preserved them for us. 

2 Warfield and Hodge, Presbyterian Review, April, 1881. 



34 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

quate and inaccurate formulas; they 
are the scholastic drill of infantile 
souls, the "beggarly elements" of an 
immature dispensation. Something of 
mother love a child may learn by play- 
ing with dolls; but the grown woman 
who has a living baby at her breast 
has laid aside the idols of her play 
days. She would lose the very love 
they taught if she now preferred them 
to the growing beauty of the child. 
As we shall see hereafter, there is an 
implicit rationalism in such state- 
ments which must give way to the 
religion of the spirit. 

There should be warning to the 
ministry in the memory of the sup- 
posed conflict of a generation ago be- 
tween natural science and revealed 
religion. Many preachers made the 
mistake of roundly denouncing from 
the pulpit the geologists who taught a 
greater antiquity of the earth and man 
than that allowed by the biblical 
chronology as interpreted by Arch- 



AND PREACHING 35 

bishop Usher, and the inclusion of 
man in the continuity of living 
organisms indicated by Darwinism. 
Then, later, others were led into the 
still more serious blunder of con- 
structing elaborate harmonies of 
science and religion. Moses and the 
prophets were supposed to have an- 
ticipated Herschel, Lyall, Huxley, and 
Tyndall. By both the dogmatic de- 
nial and the absurd harmonizing the 
preacher abdicated his real throne of 
power and missed the meaning of 
Holy Writ. To say, as has been said 
so many times, that every latest dis- 
covery in physical science will finally 
be found in agreement with Scripture 
properly interpreted, is simply another 
way of saying that we theologians have 
become so clever in the manipulation 
of sacred texts that we shall find no 
trouble in adjusting the difficulties 
raised by any of its naive, primitive 
statements to any discoveries made 
throughout the tides of time. This 



36 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

wresting of Scripture in its defense 
will at last confuse the logic and 
callous the conscience, until the very 
temper to which truth is revealed is 
wholly lost. Some people are immune 
to dangerous microbes and can drink 
polluted water with impunity. So 
likewise many in our churches have 
taken little harm either from the bel- 
ligerent blunder of antiquated igno- 
rance or the insincere patchwork of 
would-be enlightenment; but who can 
doubt that the sense of unreality 
raised by both these thought-attitudes 
has done much to create religious in- 
difference and even widespread skep- 
ticism? Sensitive spirits by the 
thousand have been poisoned by such 
pollution of the very springs of 
salvation. 

Positive Gains to Faith 
Already the Church is beginning to 
realize positive gains to faith from the 
new methods of biblical study. The 



AND PREACHING 37 

critic's rod has shattered the rock of 
traditional theories and already the 
waters of life are beginning to flow. 
Truth itself is a gain. In the words of 
the quaint and judicious Hooker: 
"That which is most truthful is also 
most behooveful." New power will 
come to the pulpit when its message 
is spoken in this new atmosphere of 
reality. If the center of gravity as to 
biblical inspiration has shifted from a 
mechanical to a dynamic theory, there 
can be no question that it is only a 
readjustment of ballast which will 
make the ship ride more steadily. 
Some men will feel it very hard to see 
a good sermon made useless because a 
popular exegesis is made impossible. 
But the Bible was not chiefly created 
to furnish texts for preachers nor 
proof-texts for theologians. The 
Church will be vastly profited if de- 
livered from the atrocities of alle- 
gorical interpretation. When the dis- 
tortions caused by a piecemeal use of 



38 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

Scripture give place to a larger view, 
and preachers, no longer privileged 
misinterpreters, are held by the de- 
mands of a genuine grammatical and 
historical exegesis, a new respect will 
be generated for the Book of God. 

There has already been realized a 
great gain in vividness. The Bible 
is most divine when most human. 
True Protestantism has humanism, and 
not scholasticism, in its veins, and feels 
most mightily the power of the appeal 
to life. After all, it is not so much 
confirmation of o\ir faith that we 
should seek as for new views of truth 
that will vitalize it. The Bible has 
become a new book to many of us. 
Criticism has given life to an alien 
past. Above all men the preacher 
profits by possessing the historical 
imagination. The true Bible has 
power to speak across the ages, be- 
cause it is not a ready-made code, 
like the Koran, but the truly human 
record of the ways of the Spirit. The 



AND PREACHING 39 

book is made to live for modern uses 
when its supernatural element is con- 
ceived, not as a philosophical puzzle, 
but as a vital power. Prophecy gains 
new meaning when, instead of being a 
collection of mysterious oracles or 
queer puzzles for modern guessing, it 
is seen as the living message of 
God filled men to their own time. 
Nothing has more quickened the 
preaching of applied Christianity than 
this new conception of prophecy as 
ethics applied to history. What di- 
vides the preacher from the people 
more than anything else is the aca- 
demic spirit; he grows out of touch 
with life. A fresh bath in the living 
waters of a progressive revelation 
would wash the mind of the profes- 
sional taint; religion would no longer 
be a bit of far-off moral archaeology 
digged up from the debris of centuries, 
but a present, living fact. The critic, 
with all his limitations, is often a juicier 
person than the dogmatist. 



40 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

The Moral Gain 
There is also an ethical gain from 
the new attitude. If Scripture is no 
longer used to justify slavery, polyg- 
amy, and despotism; if the morals of 
a primitive age are no longer invested 
with a divine sanction and invoked 
to feed the fires of bigotry and intol- 
erance; if judges do not now burn 
witches nor conquerors bear the sword 
of religious persecution in the name of 
Jehovah of Israel, a great and lasting 
gain has been realized. It may be 
said that those things have already 
passed away; but, if so, it is because 
the Bible has taught men better than 
their narrow theory of it would allow. 
Such is its inherent vitality that gen- 
uine nourishment for the soul has al- 
ways been derived from it in spite of 
impossible mistranslations and pre- 
posterous exegesis. And here emerges 
a still higher moral advance for the 
pulpit message. The preacher has 
been delivered from the toils of 



AND PREACHING 41 

apologetic sophistry, from insincere 
harmonizing, and from conscience- 
deadening casuistry. He is no longer 
called to the defense of an obsolete 
morality or a worn-out social order. 
Indeed, the traditionalists themselves 
are already reaping this benefit. They 
themselves do not, with heroic loyalty 
to the letter of Scripture, condone 
polygamy, defend slavery, practice 
feet-washing, indulge in the holy kiss, 
teach the superior sanctity of celibacy, 
forbid a second marriage for bishops, 
or preach the social subjection of 
women. Even the literalist has quite 
ceased the futile effort of squaring his 
practice with the theoretical convic- 
tions of literal Bible-teaching. The 
moral battle will have been won when 
he attains an intellectual standpoint 
which will relieve him of this incon- 
sistency. Criticism does consciously 
and with reason what piety has always 
done unconsciously and sometimes 
with much perplexity. The blessings 



42 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

of Jesus have always superseded the 
curses of the psalmist in Christian 
morals. The enlightened conscience 
has always been a critic. 

The Apologetic Gain 
The fresh moral orientation of Scrip- 
ture through critical reconstruction is 
also an apologetic gain. A needless 
barrier to faith has been removed when 
the preacher no longer feels compelled 
to palliate or explain away ethical per- 
versities or intellectual contradictions 
in the Holy Book. A rigid literalism 
and mechanicalism is helpless in the 
presence to a multitude of difficulties 
for which the traditional theories of 
composition and authorship furnish no 
explanation excepting forced and un- 
natural harmonies. It is often alleged 
by superficial scholars that many of 
the phenomena discovered by the 
higher criticism are simply repetitions 
of the blasphemies of Voltaire, Paine, 
and other eighteenth century skeptics. 



AND PREACHING 43 

Surely, "a lie which is half a truth is 
ever the blackest of lies." 1 The fact 
is that the objections to Christianity 
raised by these enemies of faith were 
based on real difficulties. For these 
perplexing phenomena, on account of 
which they denied the divine revela- 
tion, traditionalism had no answers 
save those which either wrested the 
Scriptures themselves or did violence 
to the human understanding; the his- 
torical and literary criticism, however, 
has thrown these into their proper 
perspective by the methods of scien- 
tific analysis, and so furnishes a natural 
explanation. So long as we confound 
the form with the substance of Chris- 
tian teaching there is the endless 
obligation and the impossible task 
imposed upon the teachers of religion 
to defend every possible flaw in the 
earthen vessels which have conveyed 
to us the heavenly treasures. The 
modern method, which dares to dis- 

1 Tennyson, "The Grandmother.'; 



44 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

criminate between the temporal and 
eternal in Holy Scripture, sweeps away 
at once the trivialities of a credulous 
dogmatism and the shallow sophis- 
tries of a superficial skepticism. The 
alleged "mistakes of Moses" collapse 
in a moment when placed in this 
larger light. We need no longer, 
ostrichlike, hide our heads in the sand 
and refuse to see the problems that 
have perplexed sincere souls as well 
as given weapons to dishonest denial 
and doubt. It is a divine discrimina- 
tion which has taught us that the 
healing is not in the hem nor the robe 
of the Lord who wears it, but in 
himself, and that its living efficacy 
is not hindered by flaws in the 
weaving nor the dust on the hem 
which it has gathered along the 
road of the ages. 

Criticism Justified 
Such have been some of the perils 
of the new criticism, and such the 



AND PREACHING 45 

splendid promise of the gains. Cer- 
tainly there is nothing to warrant the 
hysterical condition into which some 
have fallen. The seeming condescen- 
sion of superiority implied in the word 
"higher," the ignorant misuse of the 
word "criticism," as if it principally in- 
volved unfavorable judgments, and 
were merely finding flaws in the sacred 
writings, the hasty results of "freak" 
criticism in some radical quarters, the 
illegitimate confusion of philosophic 
with literary and historical criticism — 
these have discredited the careful work 
of devout scholarship among the un- 
thinking. The minister, above all 
men, should set about the grateful 
task of reassuring troubled minds and 
burdened hearts. The fact is that 
the word "criticism," both by its 
etymological and in its scientific use, 
merely means discernment, discrimina- 
tion, and judgment. To criticize the 
Bible is simply to do justice to it. 
The realm of criticism always begins 



46 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

the moment we pass the bounds of 
personal experience. Things outside 
that realm are-brought into experience 
only by an act of judgment. It is 
the fundamental principle of Protes- 
tantism that religious belief is no ex- 
ception to the rule governing truth in 
general. The right of private judgment 
is not a denial of authority, but the 
assertion that authority is only such 
by credentials which provoke the as- 
sent of the critical sense. All men who 
form any mental concepts or utter any 
form of propositional judgments em- 
ploy the critical method. Some do it 
with the help of dogmatic presupposi- 
tions and a priori speculative theories, 
and so reach results tainted with per- 
sonal bias; others begin by criticizing 
their own mental process, and reach 
their results with the help of scientific 
canons of evidence. When the bel- 
ligerently orthodox Gilbert Chesterton 
notes that very valuable fact in our 
Lord's mental method, his frequent 



AND PREACHING 47 

use of the a fortiori appeal, 1 he is quite 
as truly a higher critic as is Wellhausen 
in disengaging the threefold strands of 
the life and legislation of Israel. We 
are all critics of some sort or other. 
To dispense with criticism is to be 
without judgment. 

The science of biblical criticism, 
therefore, needs to be placed in its 
right light before the people, as the 
glorious consummation of the Protes- 
tant principle of soul-liberty as its 
religious ground, and of the gram- 
matico-historical exegesis as its 
scientific ground. The ideas of the 
Reformation will continue to make 
their way in spite of bigots and 
obscurantists. In the meantime con- 
fessions remain to confuse us and 
hierarchies to harry us, and the one 
great papacy is giving way to count- 
less little papacies with much less 
historical reason for being. Still a 
great, even an incalculable service was 

1 Orthodoxy, p. 272. 



48 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

accomplished when the Bible took the 
place of the Church as objective au- 
thority in religion. For this is a great 
glory of Holy Scripture, that while a 
false misunderstanding of its relation 
to Him who alone is the truth may 
blind us to its highest worth, it will 
at last, if patiently studied and loyally 
trusted, render the high service of 
freeing us from bondage to its letter 
by imparting its own spirit of free- 
dom. Without any need of defining 
the measure or mode of its inspiration, 
he who studies it with open mind and 
heart feels the truth of the free Spirit 
moving through it; every leaf of its 
forest of truth quivers with his power, 
and even the deadest branch of obso- 
lete custom, crumbling chronicle, or 
sapless genealogys ways in the onward 
sweep of the wind of God. The vital 
principle of the Reformation remains 
to be worked out. That principle 
teaches the privacy of the relations of 
every individual soul to God, a privacy 



AND PREACHING 49 

sacred from the intervention of any- 
outward thing, not to be defined by 
dogma nor mediated by ministering 
priest. The essence of religion is 
spiritual, and this inward liberty must 
be granted up to its farthest con- 
sequences. 

The Pulpit and Intellectual 
Liberty 

Preaching is possible as a living 
force only in an environment in which 
every mechanical device of confession 
and institution has been made mobile 
and fluid by the fusing fire of free 
thought. It is the appeal of person 
to person, of life to life, and demands 
a purely moral world in which author- 
ity takes the form of influence. A 
dogmatic pulpit is decadent in any 
period in which men realize their 
heritage of political, social, and spirit- 
ual liberty. The sermon is of little 
worth in a communion bound to the 
mechanism of sacramental grace, the 



50 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

inflexible mold of confessionalism, or 
the absolutist thought forms of a 
rationalistic philosophy. It is highly 
significant that in that absurd cult 
which rivals Islam as a book-religion 
and arrogates the title of Christian 
Science, the sermon has been super- 
seded by the written code, and the 
preacher has given place to the 
"reader." If Christian preaching is to 
survive the social and intellectual revo- 
lution of this age, it will be because of 
the new life given it by the free 
atmosphere of critical thought. Ex- 
perimental religion has always 
handled Holy Scripture in this free 
way. Personal piety is always essen- 
tially pragmatic in its use of our 
whole heritage of institutions, doc- 
trines, and records. This is the often 
forgotten secret of the sermon, that 
it seeks for immediate moral action 
rather than mere mental assent. The 
Church verifies Scripture by preach- 
ing and applying it. It was not by 



AND PREACHING 51 

any external proof of their canonicity 
or authenticity that the Epistles to 
the Romans and Galatians became a 
living word to the period of the 
Reformation, but the fact that they 
spoke to a need of the human con- 
science and won the response of a liv- 
ing trust in the saving Lord that 
they revealed. The truth of divine 
revelation upon the preacher's lips is 
not a proposition to be proved, or a 
doctrine to be discovered, but a Word 
to be done. His business is not to 
turn reality into abstractions of the 
intellect, but to be forever showing 
the life value of every revealing in 
God's word and works. Every true 
preacher is always consciously or un- 
consciously a critic, and follows a 
genetic method, presenting truths in 
the order in which they arise in per- 
sonal experience. Anthropology, with 
its disclosure of human sin and re- 
ligious needs, will always precede 
soteriology, and the rich revelation of 



52 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

the triune God will be the crown 
rather than the commencement of his 
teaching. Preaching stands solitary 
among all rhetorical performances and 
human acts, as a voice out of the 
eternal verities spoken in the ears of 
time. This note of immediacy in the 
message of the preacher must always 
rest upon that in Scripture which is 
self-evidencing and not upon anything 
laboriously established by external 
credentials. 

Authority and Inspiration 
How, then, can the Bible be used as 
an authoritative norm in Christian 
teaching? This question is the very 
crux of the relation of criticism to 
preaching. Yet the answer is simple 
enough. Religion knows that God is 
revealed in the Bible; criticism has 
nothing to do with that fact, but only 
with the method by which the record 
of many and progressive revelations 
has been transmitted to us. "Every 



AND PREACHING 53 

How?" says Aristotle, "rests on a 
What?" The fact of revelation is 
primary and makes a direct appeal to 
the religious consciousness; the method 
of revelation is secondary and can be 
discovered only by means of critical 
investigation. Indeed, the words "au- 
thority, " " inerrancy/ ' c 'infallibility, ' ' 
and the like, are words of dispute 
which usually would be better left 
alone by the preacher. If back of his 
message he feels the force of the 
thing itself, he can neglect the am- 
biguous names that men have given 
it. ! For the Holy Book and the min- 
ister's message are alike in this, that 
they have supremely the authority 
which they can win in their own right 
and not that which is given by 
any traditional theory or external 
credentials. 

It is evident that the extra-con- 
fessional doctrine of verbal inspiration, 
with its implication of inerrancy in all 
sorts of statements, involving an au- 



54 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

thority applied ab extra to the human 
understanding and conscience, is a 
piece of intellectual immorality; and 
more, it is actual rationalism — an en- 
thronement of the human reason above 
the moral nature of both man and 
God. 1 Without support in the Book 
itself, without any deep root in Chris- 
tian antiquity or any warrant in the 
principles of the reformers, it was a 
very human device of the Protestant 
schoolmen of the seventeenth century 
to substitute the Book for the Church 
as an objective authority for the de- 
livery of dogma. These scholastics 
succeeded in rejecting the actual Bible 
which Luther had liberated and Calvin 
had expounded, by casting it into 
their confessional molds. One high 
service of criticism is the recovery of 
the real Bible. If great names are 
worth anything to the Church, if 
there is any element of authority in 

1 It might be well for our generation to reread Bishop 
Butler's great chapter in the Anaiog3 r , "of our incapacity 
for judging what were to be expected in a Revelation." 



AND PREACHING 55 

high spiritual leadership or profound 
and devout scholarship, there is an 
unspeakable absurdity in our trying 
to see the Book of books through the 
spectacles of a lot of second-class men 
whose very names are mostly forgot- 
ten. Their teaching gave rise to the 
deadest preaching the Church has 
known in any age, save that of me- 
diaeval monkery, and has everywhere 
ended in a spiritual dearth only less 
disastrous than that caused by Roman 
error. This mechanical theory of Holy 
Scripture, which has tried to fasten 
upon the Church the traditional dat- 
ing and authorship of the sacred 
documents, is not itself a true, but a 
bastard tradition without the sanction 
of antiquity or the support of ecclesias- 
tical authority. No branch of the 
Christian Church, not even the seven- 
teenth century confessions themselves 
(excepting a single Swiss formulary), 
has ever made the inerrancy in detail 
of the Bible an article of faith. 



56 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

The fact just noted is of great sig- 
nificance; especially is it so to the 
preacher. He is not bound by any 
creed subscription to any theory of 
the composition of the sacred books 
which sets a limit on the most search- 
ing investigation of their problems and 
the freest handling of their contents 
for the purposes of religious edifica- 
tion. If ever there has been that 
"inspiration of superintendence" of 
which dogmatists talk so knowingly, 
surely, it is in this significant fact, 
that the Holy Spirit in guiding the 
Church into all truth has kept it from 
ever decreeing as doctrine a theory of 
the Scriptures which would have in- 
evitably left them liable to the de- 
stroying touch of time and advancing 
knowledge. Surely, the prudence of 
the Church in this regard has not 
been without the leadership of the 
Paraclete promised by our Lord. He 
it is who has inspired the freedom of 
scholarship and the courage of the 



AND PREACHING 57 

preacher. " Where the spirit of the 
Lord is, there is liberty," and there 
too the veil falls from the face of Holy 
Writ, and men see with open vision 
the Lord himself. 1 

There are two rationalisms neither 
of which must be allowed to invade 
the pulpit. One is the rationalism of 
criticism, that mighty Nimrod against 
the Lord, the beginning and ending 
of whose kingdom is a very Babel of 
confusion; the other is even more 
subtly dangerous — the theological ra- 
tionalism which forms an a priori 
theory of what would be a worthy 
revelation of God and then tries to 
force the Bible into the mold of its 
definition, instead of reverently asking 
what sort of revelation has God, in 
fact, given us? We have no right to 
dictate on what mountaintops of his- 
tory or life God has distilled, or 
through what channels he has gath- 
ered the streams which at last formed 

^Cor. 4. 15-17. 



58 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

this river of life. The sermon cannot 
command the ways of the Spirit. This 
"wind bloweth where it listeth." The 
trim tape line of our logic shall never 
fathom the depths of life's great sea. 
We must avoid, on the one hand, the 
scientific fallacy of the genetic method 
that assumes that we have explained 
anything though we may have de- 
scribed everything, and the theologi- 
cal fallacy of absolutism that you can 
discover a set of formulas that account 
for all things. Scientific truth alike 
in the physical and spiritual realm is 
not a fixed quantum that can be meas- 
ured, but a moving function of partly 
known reality, needing perpetual re- 
statement with widening vision. It is 
not a land-locked pond, but a flowing 
river. Dogma is frozen truth. Ice is 
easier to. handle than water, but has 
to be turned back into water before it 
can be used. There is a machine type 
of mind that prefers to skate on the 
ice rather than to plunge into the 



AND PREACHING 59 

flood of religious reality; skating is 
easier and safer for most folks than 
swimming. Such men make excellent 
priests with their cold-storage system 
for the preservation of the past; they 
are not the prophets who see, and by 
seeing help to shape God's to-morrow. 1 
That preacher will have a better 
Bible whom the critical process has 
enabled to discriminate between the 
transient and permanent elements in 
sacred literature, between the Book 
and the divine revelation which it 
incloses, for the preacher belongs to 
that same holy economy that pro- 
duced the Bible. He is in the succes- 
sion of patriarchs, prophets, and apos- 
tles who spoke as they were wrought 
upon by the Holy Spirit. Revelation 
existed millenniums before Moses, 
David, Isaiah, or Paul, and it lived 
in their lives before they wrote a sin- 

1 On the whole subject of theological rationalism and 
the intellectual disease of dogmatism, see the very instruc- 
tive discussion in F. C. S. Schiller's "Formal Logic: 
A Scientific and Social Problem/ 7 pp. 400-405. 



60 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

gle word. It is a record of religious 
experiences of abiding moral and spirit- 
ual reality, which men won from con- 
tact with the living God. It is a 
concentration of the stored spiritual 
testimony of the race, found at its 
highest in the holy fellowship we call 
the Church, and in the Church found 
atjits highest in that Book in which the 
princes of the heavenly kingdom have 
left their record of what God did in 
and by them. The spiritual life is 
propagated by the personal witness, 
and the Bible contains that witness in 
its loftiest literary expression. It en- 
ables us to follow the divine Spirit in 
the spiritual evolution of the race. It 
is more than a text-book for the 
minister; it is a treasury of inexhaus- 
tible spiritual material. 

Divine and Human 
Revelation is divine; its record is 
human. The Bible is divine-human, 
like its Lord, As he wore the swad- 



AND PREACHING 61 

dling-bands of a Jewish babe, was 
incarnate in human flesh, and grew in 
the stature and wisdom of a truly- 
human development, so does the rev- 
elation of God embody itself in human 
speech, submit to the bondage of 
earthly form of thought and ex- 
perience and grow with the growth 
of the race in its capacity to receive 
and reveal God. To deny the human 
element in the Bible is a sort of liter- 
ary Docetism like that early and 
deadly heresy that rejected the hu- 
manity of Christ. Its outward form, 
like his, is subject to weariness, wast- 
ing, and death. In our holiest mo- 
ments we must refuse to know either 
the eternal Word or the written Word 
after the flesh. We must affirm its 
humanness to go beyond it. We must, 
indeed, in deference to our under- 
standing, come to the Bible as to any 
other book, but we can never leave it 
with that thought. It wears human 
and historical forms, and is not im- 



62 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

mune in that form to the limitations 
imposed by it, but is still most divine 
where most warmly human. For the 
supernatural ever works through and 
by the natural. All elements in the 
Bible are not of equal value for re- 
ligious edification. The life in the 
human body has as truly created the 
hair upon the head as the brain within 
it, but one can more easily dispense 
with the hair than with the brain. 
Criticism may destroy many of the 
accidents; it cannot touch the sub- 
stance of divine revelation. Not one 
of the staple tenets of religion is 
affected by its processes, but all are 
disengaged by it and disencumbered 
of their earthly dress. 

What authority, it is asked, remains 
in a book in which it is admitted there 
may be possible errors and earthly 
imperfections? The answer is not far 
to seek: it has just that authority 
which it needs to do its work, and 
that is all the authority which the 



AND PREACHING 63 

pulpit can appropriate or use. That 
which is truly divine in the Book, its 
religious content, is there, and not in 
our theory of it. Its authority does 
not consist in itself, but in the sort of 
response it awakens in the soul. This 
is the only certainty that can carry 
conviction, the inward assurance cre- 
ated by the direct vision of truth. 
Revelation does not need authority; 
it confers it. Its messages are com- 
mands that are at home in the realm 
of motive and directly appeal to the 
will. That sermon is best which has 
this element of vision and immediacy 
and whose simple statement is its own 
best proof. 

The sort of infallibility claimed for 
the Bible on traditional theories does 
not make its religious worth. There 
is a fine phrase attributed to Cardinal 
Baronius: "The Bible was given us, 
not to teach us how the heavens go, 
but to tell us how to go to heaven." 1 

1 Quoted in Guizot's Meditations. 



64 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

The books of Samuel and of Chronicles 
differ widely in the number of shekels 
given by David to Araunah in pay- 
ment for his oxen and the site of the 
temple. 1 What does it matter? We 
are not specially interested in the 
quotations of live stock or the price 
of real estate in Jerusalem at that 
remote date. No question of duty or 
destiny hangs upon such facts, but 
there is eternal worth in the kingly 
protest of David, "I will not offer 
unto the Lord that which doth cost 
me no thing/ ' We must learn to re- 
spect the reserve of revelation, in that 
it does not furnish ready-made an- 
swers for the questions raised by 
scientific or historical curiosity. It 
has indeed immense value as a his- 
torical source; it does supply a wealth 
of information in a thousand different 
directions^ but in such matters it is 
subject to the question of criticism and 
may be corrected by investigation. Its 

1 2 Sam. 24. 24; 1 Chron. 21. 25. 



AND PREACHING 65 

supreme worth, and that which vindi- 
cates its claim to inspiration, is that 
it is "able to make us wise unto salva- 
tion." The locomotive headlight 
shows little of the landscape to the 
passengers, but it does light up the 
track before the engineer. Everything 
in Holy Scripture is subordinate to the 
divine revelation it incloses. Its his- 
tory, archaeology, geography, litera- 
ture all have their interest to the 
Christian student, but he dare not 
rest his religious hope on such things. 
The preacher cannot make this earthly 
element the subject of his sermons. 
His message is found in those moral 
and spiritual magnitudes which the 
book discloses, which have an abso- 
lute worth in themselves, constituting 
their authority to every moral being. 
Bones are necessary to the structure 
of a shad, and are immensely interest- 
ing to the student of anatomy, but 
only the sweet flesh isjnourishing to a 
hungry man. 



66 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

Criticism has not only helped to de- 
fine authority in this truly Protestant 
and spiritual sense, but it has also 
emphasized this authoritative element. 
That the historical books of the Old 
Testament are what is called prag- 
matic history has often been used by 
radical critics as an excuse for draw- 
ing inferences unfavorable to their 
veracity. That is for the most part 
pure assumption. But if the golden 
mist of religious meaning through 
which the chroniclers saw the story 
of Israel did dim some of its outlines, 
it also acted as a lens to magnify its 
deeper spiritual truths. When we see 
in the Old Testament the culminating 
religious consciousness of Israel, read- 
ing all its past in the moral light of the 
prophetic teaching and legal disci- 
pline, gathering in one sheaf its songs, 
traditions, laws, and literature, and 
illuminating and interpreting all these 
by the radiant glory of its highest 
spiritual achievement, it gains new 



AND PREACHING 67 

life and value. The inspiration passes 
back of the book into the history it- 
self. "Thus said the Lord" yields in 
significance to "Thus did the Lord." 
God, and not man, is seen to be the 
supreme actor in the affairs of this 
world. This point of view is of in- 
finite value to the preacher. His duty 
is to proclaim that the religious view 
of the world is as valid as the scientific 
view, and in the end immeasurably 
more true, because inclosing more of 
the facts of life. Pragmatic, or, as 
Father Tyrrell calls it, prophetic his- 
tory, 1 is truest to the deep heart of 
things. He who can see in the stories 
of Balaam's ass and of Jonah and the 
fish nothing but queer natural history 
has missed the meaning of the gracious 
message. Just because the Hebrew 
mind saw truth concretely and ex- 
pressed it in symbols rather than 
propositions, it was fitted to be the 
medium to convey the truths of life 

1 Through Scylla and Charybdis, chap. IX. 



68 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

and conduct, even as the Greek intel- 
lect with its love of abstractions was 
adapted to be the vehicle of scientific 
statement. The minister must learn 
to interpret Holy Scripture along the 
line of its own genius, and not allow 
its truth to be dominated or manipu- 
lated by the dogmatic passion for 
propositional truth. Even those pre- 
scientific answers of cosmogonic ques- 
tions found in the first chapters of 
Genesis reveal the relation of God to 
his world as it could never be discov- 
ered in the laboratory or the observa- 
tory. These are the " truths that 
perish never.' ' 

And so the Bible becomes not apart 
from, but one with all God's dealings 
with the world. We no longer see his 
only revealing act in the dictation of 
a book. Revelation is not confined to 
Hebrew channels, although it was 
there that its rushing tides made 
deepest grooves in the rocks of time. 
It has served its purpose when it has 



AND PREACHING 69 

given us its own vision of the living 
God. The preacher, to make this 
use of the sacred Book, must have 
caught its spirit and come to see all 
history, nature, and life as revelation. 

I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream, 
Through years, through men, through nature 
fleet, 
Through love and thought, through power 
and dream. 1 

Its authority is pedagogic; it will suc- 
ceed so far as it teaches men to look 
beyond itself and causes them to cry, 
"Now we believe, not because of thy 
saying, for we have heard Him our- 
selves." 2 

It cannot be too often insisted upon 
that reality does not depend upon our 
construction of it. Facts are facts, 
and are not made or unmade by 
science. The stars shine on the same, 
even if astrology has given place to 

1 Emerson, "Two Rivers.'! 

2 John 4. 42. 



70 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

astronomy; their brightness does not 
depend upon any theory of their mo- 
tion or their influence. The rings of 
Saturn are as glorious as ever, even if 
disintegrating criticism should show 
them to be composed of meteorites. 
That which is truly divine in the 
Bible is just the part which criticism 
cannot disturb, and its sacredness is 
the more completely attested by that 
very fact. There is a deep in the 
Holy Scriptures which speaks to the 
deep in the heart of man, and the 
diapason of its majestic music will 
speak all the more clearly when we 
no longer allow our ears to be dis- 
tracted by the washing of the ripple 
on the surface or the cry of the lonely 
seabird above the waves. Practical 
ends survive the shock of changed 
doctrine. Bread will continue to 
nourish even when bacteriology has 
developed a new theory of yeast. 
Doubtless an age that knows chemis- 
try will produce better bread than 



AND PREACHING 71 

the age of scientific ignorance; but 
the preacher is a dealer in the bread 
of life and not a chemist who inquires 
into its scientific structure. 

The Highest Criticism 
Beyond the higher criticism there is 
a highest criticism, based not on the 
canons of evidence, but on spiritual 
insight. The supreme agent in the 
interpretation of Scripture is the Holy 
Spirit. Inspiration has to do, not 
with information, but with insight, not 
with historicity or science, but with 
those spiritual things which are spirit- 
ually criticized or discerned. The 
preacher must rise from the profes- 
sionalism of the priest to the power of 
the pulpit, by this discrimination of 
spiritual values. It is noteworthy 
that in the great Protestant confes- 
sions this witness of the Spirit has 
always been made an essential part of 
the doctrine of Sacred Scripture. Thus 
the noble symbol of Westminster tes- 



72 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

tifies : "Our full persuasion of the 
infallible truth and divine authority 
thereof is from the inward work of the 
Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and 
with the word in our heart." 1 So the 
older Scotch confession quaintly says 
that, in Scripture, the "true Kirk 
alwaies heares and obeys the voice of 
her awin spouse and pastor." 2 This 
is the doctrine of Calvin, who 
affirms of Scripture that "it is self- 
authenticated, carrying with it its own 
evidence, and ought not to be made 
the subject of demonstration and ar- 
guments from reason, but it obtains 
the credit that it deserves with us by the 
testimony of the Spirit." 3 

The Church has always placed ex- 
perience first and scientific knowledge 
afterward. Its maxim has ever been 
Credo ut intelligam. And contrariwise, 
all formulas that cannot be translated 
into terms of experience are to the 

1 Confession, I, §5. 

2 Ant., 19. 

3 Institutes, I, Chap. VII, 5. 



AND PREACHING 73 

religious sense negligible. There is a 
preparation for preaching more funda- 
mental than the preparation of the 
sermon — it is the preparation of the 
preacher. No man can really preach 
that as the Word of God which has 
not been such to himself. He cannot 
interpret Moses until for him earth's 
trees have been aflame with the divine 
presence; he cannot explain Isaiah un- 
til his own lips have felt the cleansing 
touch of the live coal from the upper 
sanctuary; he cannot preach Paul's 
gospel until God has revealed his Son 
in him as in the great apostle to the 
Gentiles. 

O could I tell, you surely would believe it! 

O could I only say what I have seen! \ 
How could I tell, or how can you receive it, 

How, till He bringeth you where I have 
been? 

Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail nor falter; 

Nay, but I ask it, nay, but I desire; 
Lay on my lips the embers of the altar, 

Seal with the sting and furnish with the fire. 



74 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

Quick, in a moment, infinite forever, 
Send an arousal better than I pray; 

Give me a grace upon the faint endeavor, 
Souls for my hire and Pentecost to-day! 1 

It was this highest criticism that our 
Lord and his servant Paul brought to 
the teaching of the Old Testament. It 
is the hallowing of criticism which 
alone can make the new learning, or 
any learning, safe to the preacher. It 
would be but empty erudition to dis- 
cover the exilic date of the latter 
chapters of Isaiah and then to miss 
the deeper meaning given by this new 
historic setting of these words of con- 
solation, the very loftiest mountain- 
peak of prophecy. To find that 
Babylonian cosmogonic myths have 
furnished the symbolic language for 
apocalyptic literature, or that Persian 
dreams of angelic hierarchies, judg- 
ment, world restoration, and resur- 
rection have shaped the later beliefs 
of Israel, would be but idle pedantry 

1 F. W. H. Myers, "Saint Paul.", 



AND PREACHING 75 

to any preacher who had not also the 
insight to see that it is the spiritual 
genius of the chosen people and their 
experience of God which has shaped 
from all these fragments of alien cul- 
ture something which Babylon never 
built and Persia never could have 
produced. It is by this highest criti- 
cism that the Church has determined 
the canon of Scripture. It has not 
been wholly, or even chiefly, by the 
will of man acting on traditional evi- 
dence, but by a divine discernment, 
born of spiritual sympathy, that these 
books have survived; it has been a 
conservation of supreme values. The 
Bible lives by being lived. 

"The sword of the Spirit is the 
word of God." It is spiritual truth 
alone that can slay sin and save souls. 
It is not by syllogisms or argument 
that men can be won to Christianity. 
When the promised Paraclete cometh 
"he shall convince the world." The 
preacher might well despair if he were 



76 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

sent to work without this weapon, if 
he were expected to conquer by logical 
proofs. It is by the "unction of the 
Holy One" that the divine knowledge 
comes. 1 The Church lives in a present 
world of religious reality, a kingdom in 
which the risen Lord reigns and the 
Spirit administers. God is his own 
interpreter. Inspiration is no outworn 
and isolated fact; the divine message 
in the book is attested by the in- 
dwelling Spirit in the life of the be- 
liever. We can believe in a Bible 
that leads us to God; we could not 
vitally believe in a God who referred 
us to a book. "The kingdom of God 
is not in word, but in power." 

The Purpose of Preaching 
The purpose of preaching is to se- 
cure that response to the gospel which 
we call saving faith. Now, this faith 
is not the acceptance of laboriously 
certified credentials or acquiescence in 

1 1 John 2. 20. 



AND PREACHING 77 

any form of words, but an act of trust 
in a living Person. Biblical faith is 
something more than faith in the 
Bible. 1 Belief in the Bible is one 
thing, and may lead to all sorts of 
opinions, sensible and absurd; the 
living faith inspired by the Bible is 
quite another thing, for it is a present 
experience of saving grace and power. 
As Principal Forsyth has well said: 
"We shall not be judged by what we 
thought of the Bible, but by what we 
did with its gospel; not by what 
we know of the Bible, but by the way 
it made us realize we were known of 
God. We shall be rich, not by the 
ore, but by the gold." 2 That pulpit 
which the cleansing fire of criticism 
has driven from the outworks of the 
letter to the stronghold of the spirit, 
and which has won the glad, confident 
note of a personal experience of eternal 
reality born of the self-evidencing 

J See the interesting discussions in Menegoz's Le 
Fideisme, Nos. 11 and 37. 
2 Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1911, p. 250. 



78 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

power of the truth of God, will speak 
with fresh energy, for its message will 
be " words which the Holy Spirit 
teaches/ ' and will be accompanied 
with an abiding demonstration and 
power, ministered by the Spirit of 
God. 

It is not in a Book, but in a living 
Being, that God is supremely re- 
vealed. The only possible disclosure 
of a personal God is in a divine Per- 
son. To preach the Word is to preach 
Christ. Jesus reproaches the Jews 
with their mistaken reverence for and 
study of the Scriptures, and their 
unfounded belief that they could find 
eternal life in written documents, and 
condemns them for refusing to come 
to him for life. "These are they 
which testify of me." 1 He declines 
the faith that is built on externals, 
that demands miracles, and he will 
not allow even the Scriptures to be 
his rival. That preaching is best 

1 John 5. 39 (Authorized Version). 



AND PREACHING 79 

which brings the soul face to face with 
a living and present Lord; the men of 
to-day must receive the grace of God 
as the apostles did — directly from him. 
There is but one final authority for 
the Christian faith: it is the historic 
Jesus, who is the present Christ. The 
one point at which the spiritual and 
historical coincide is "Christ in us 
the hope of glory ." No higher service 
can be rendered by a ministry which 
has been instructed by the critical 
method, than to bring back the faith 
of the Church to its one unshaken 
ground of certainty. Faith has its 
citadel, which is Jesus Christ, and 
they who construct other frail for- 
tresses of human theory and opinion, 
and insist that the perpetuity of the 
Christian system is involved in the de- 
fense of these crazy ; structures of 
human tradition, ignore what is the 
true defense and glory of our Chris- 
tianity. The preaching of the cross is 
still the power of God to us which are 



80 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

saved. The modern preacher, like 
Paul, finds himself confronted by the 
Jews who require a sign and the Greeks 
who seek wisdom, 1 represented to-day 
in the traditionalists who demand the 
unnatural and abnormal, and the ra- 
tionalists who would substitute criti- 
cism for faith. But to them that are 
called, Christ is still both the miracle 
and the method of God. "God has 
spoken !" So writes the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. He spoke in 
times past in fragmentary and varied 
ways by the prophets, but in these 
last days by a Son. 2 This is the word 
of faith which we preach. 

I have a life in Christ to live; 
But ere I live it must I wait 
Till learning can clear answer give 

Of this or that book's date? 
I have a life in Christ to live, 
- I have a death in Christ to die; 
And must I wait till science give 
All doubts a full reply? 3 

1 1 Cor. 1. 22, 24. 

2 Heb. 1. 1, 2. 

3 John Campbell Shairp. 



AND PREACHING 81 

Surely not, for he is his own answer to 
all questions about him. Truth, dead in 
the tomb of dogma, has sprung into life 
at the question of criticism. Through 
all the clouds of controversy there 
shines the face of the living Lord. 

The Need of the Ministry 
The situation suggests the need of a 
more strenuous scholarship on the 
part of the ministry. The preacher 
will not be a worse Christian nor a 
poorer preacher for knowing some- 
thing about the Bible. Criticism has 
placed the emphasis on biblical rather 
than systematic theology, and the 
hunger for the Word of God can be 
satisfied only by a pulpit which is 
"mighty in the Scriptures/ ' Biblical 
exposition must largely take the place 
of those academic essays in homi- 
letics which are called topical sermons. 
The health of the Church calls for 
fruit freshly gathered in the garden 
of God rather than for canned goods 



82 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

from the theological pantry-shelf. 
Such preaching will be based in a 
sound exegesis, and true exegesis is 
critical; that is, it applies the canons 
of literary and historical judgment to 
the interpretation of the text. Spirit- 
ual insight is more than grammatical 
knowledge, but it cannot dispense 
with grammar; mere piety may miss 
many a precious lesson through ig- 
norance. The Puritan pulpit, often 
considered the most narrowly dog- 
matic, furnishes one great name which 
is both inspiration and example. Our 
time needs a Baxter, who to profound 
learning and deep experimental piety 
joined unflinching courage, uncompro- 
mising veracity, and transparent sin- 
cerity. The prophet and the scribe, 
the schoolman and the saint, the 
preacher and the teacher will meet in 
this mighty ministry. 

All preachers cannot be critics, but 
they all can and should win the 
temper of mind which reveres knowl- 



AND PREACHING 83 

edge and appropriates its wealth. We 
can cease basing our faith on un- 
tenable grounds and defending it with 
perilous weapons. We can guard 
against the seductions of silence that 
dodges the difficulties besetting souls 
and hides in a coward's castle of 
safety, rather than dares to conserve 
the truth by its courageous use; we 
must not with impudent hypocrisy 
dare to "offer to the God of truth the 
unclean sacrifice of a lie"; 1 we will 
not exalt fidelity to form and con- 
fessional conformity above inward 
spirituality and outward holiness. It 
is possible to be as doctrinally ortho- 
dox as the Pharisees and ecclesiasti- 
cally correct as the Sadducees, and 
still send Christ to the cross. We 
must not eternally raise the cry of 
"Wolf!" to whistle the dogs and stam- 
pede the sheep at the approach of 
mental difficulties to faith, and raise 
no cry of alarm at the darker dangers 

1 Bacon. 



84 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

of wickedness and worldliness. We 
may learn to recognize in the living 
question of an active mind something 
more akin to a saving faith than can 
be found in the dead answers of a 
sluggish spirit. Above all, the preacher 
of to-day, as of every age, must learn 
to live first-hand from God; and only 
as that special experience of divine 
love and power we call salvation 
arises and is reproduced in his own 
heart, can he either receive the revela- 
tion from the holy Book or preach it 
to sinful souls. 

No higher service can be rendered 
by the minister in this critical crisis 
for the Church than to utilize it in 
arousing a new interest in Bible study. 
When the Book was looked upon as 
inerrant it frequently became too sa- 
cred for use; it was banished from the 
study of the parlor table; it became 
a magic talisman whose presence in 
the house exuded safety and sanctity 
quite apart from its contents. The 



AND PREACHING 85 

quickening of the historic spirit in 
modern thought ought to awaken a 
revival of interest in the Book of God. 
Such renewed study has always been 
the signal of spiritual revival. Before 
the invention of printing the rare 
copies of Holy Scriptures were chained 
to the reading desks of the churches. 
A vicious theory of its composition has 
again chained it to confessional sys- 
tems. Criticism is again unchaining 
the real revelation of God found in the 
sacred records. The liberated Book, 
once a priest's book, then the preacher's 
book, now the professor's book, must 
become the people's book. Give the 
Bible a chance to speak for itself, and 
it will arouse a religious response 
which will be the real remedy for the 
peril and shock caused by radical 
criticism. The Church which emulates 
the Berean nobleness which "received 
the word with all readiness of mind, 
and searched the Scriptures daily," 1 

^cts 17. 11. 



86 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

will win a knowledge which will with 
open mind welcome all new light 
breaking forth from the Book, and a 
faith that cannot be shaken by the 
changing forms of that knowledge. 

Results to the Church and 

Individual 
Such preaching and teaching will 
raise the Church above the clouds of 
controversy and sectarian bigotry. 
Sectarianism is largely born of the 
piecemeal use of Scripture. Men go 
into this orchard of fruit, not to 
gather fruit to feed their hunger, but 
to cut clubs to break each other's 
heads. To catch a glimpse of the 
progressive character of divine revela- 
tion, to feel the onwardness of its 
movement, and to discriminate the 
fragmentary sources from the abiding 
religious element, is to be delivered 
from the vicious proof -text method of 
handling Scripture. Who has not felt 
when encountering a crowd of these 



AND PREACHING 87 

excerpts from the sacred Book, col- 
lected in a cloud to support some 
doctrine, that they were much like 
that flight of Scythian arrows that 
darkened the sky rather than wounded 
the enemy? This result of the critical 
method is already in sight — a con- 
sensus, not only of critical conclu- 
sions, but of exegetical results. Unity 
is being reached through the labor 
of devout scholarship. The conver- 
gence of critical conclusions toward a 
common result is most remarkable. 
That unity which neither an infal- 
lible Church nor an infallible Book 
could ever give, will be conquered by 
the Church that is simply loyal to 
truth. One day the stones quarried 
in many a mountain of research will 
be found to fit into their places in the 
one temple of God. The preachers of 
to-morrow will be found preaching, 
not many gospels, but one Christ. 

Yet this unity will be revealed in a 
richer diversity than we ever dreamed. 



88 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

When the Bible is enfranchised from 
its irreverent abuse as a theological 
text-book and is no longer regarded as 
a formal didactic treatise made up of 
logical propositions and doctrinal defi- 
nitions, and it is seen to be as free and 
spontaneous as nature itself, preaching 
will become more rich and varied. Its 
wealth of literary form, its appro- 
priation and assimilation of the whole 
life of the ancient world, its inclusion 
of many climes and times in its testi- 
mony for God — the recognition of 
these and similar elements will give to 
preaching an opulence of material 
which no narrow dogmatism could 
command. It will mean much to the 
preacher to overcome that Chinese 
vision which sees no perspective. He 
will learn to preach as Jesus did, not 
by turning the rich variety of Scrip- 
ture into jejune forms of logical state- 
ment, as men extract vinegar from the 
luscious fruits of the orchard and vine- 
yard, but by dropping holy pictures 



AND PREACHING 89 

into their minds, that the sensitive 
soul may win its own vision and 
achieve its own thought of God. It 
is a nobler task to stir a life to shape 
its own spiritual response and form 
its own moral reactions than to dose 
a soul with truth of the tabloid type. 
Some one has said, " Science is in us, 
religion is in me") that is, science is a 
social product, religion is an indi- 
vidual experience. Criticism will real- 
ize that ideal for us, a unity of intel- 
lectual result joined to a rich diversity 
of personal expression. The way of 
faith has been made intellectually 
hard by the confusion of creeds and 
confessions, and morally too easy; it 
needs to be made simple to the mind, 
but morally strenuous to the will. 
"Securus judicat orbis terrarum" "the 
whole world cannot go wrong" — such 
was the plea of Augustine for the 
unity of the Church. A more vital 
oneness than he could have imagined 
will be wrought when, by the destruc- 



90 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

tion of the earthly scaffolding about 
the truth of God, the divine temple 
wrought of living human stones shall 
stand in its consummate beauty. True 
preaching, which is simply bringing re- 
ligious truth to the test of life, will 
certainly make the discovery that not 
one thing that has value for living has 
been lost by any possible critical proc- 
ess. No assault of logic can possibly 
capture that citadel of Christian cer- 
tainty whose foundations are in the 
holy mountains of spiritual fact. 

Criticism may compel the preacher 
to condense his creed; it does not de- 
mand that he dilute it. Let no 
young minister imagine that flippant 
flings at vicarious atonement or au- 
dacious dealing with the divinity of 
our Lord establishes him as critical in 
his methods or progressive in his 
spirit. These are 

No dead facts stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years, 1 

1 J. G. Whittier, "Our Master.". 



AND PREACHING 91 

but truths tested in the laboratory of 
human experience. " Jesus Christ and 
him crucified" is the very heart of 
that religious reality whose testimony 
made the New Testament and built 
the Church. Let no one dream that 
any criticism, either of the record or 
of the institution, can touch the facts 
that created both. The preacher who 
has lost the light of these truths from 
his mind and their power from his 
life has lost his message and should 
vacate his office. 

The lower, or textual, criticism has 
compelled revision of our versions of 
Holy Scripture. The higher criticism 
should bring about still another ver- 
sion, the translation of divine revela- 
tion, not into letters, but into life. 
This version will not be made by the 
professor, but by the preacher. The 
Bible will then be no longer the "dear 
old Book/' but the youngest and most 
contemporaneous of all books, with the 
dew of the morning upon it, the sweet- 



92 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

ness of the springtime in its messages, 
and the angel of the resurrection for- 
ever rolling the stone away from the 
perpetual new birth of its meaning. 
Revelation must be transferred from 
the past to the present tense. Our 
Holy Land must be all about us. 
Only an inspired volume can stand 
such a translation. Paul has taught 
us that the ministry of the New Tes- 
tament is just this lifting the veil 
from the ancient testimony, that the 
message graven in stone shall be ful- 
filled and superseded by the living 
epistle written in hearts by the Holy 
Spirit and read by all men in holy 
lives. 1 A prophetic ministry will give 
us an eternal gospel and make all 
men contemporary with the saving 
facts of Christianity. Nothing but 
these living Bibles of human lives 
can fully vindicate the Bible of our 
fathers. 

1 2 Cor. 3. 2, 3. 



AND PREACHING 93 

Conclusion 
Times of transition in thought are 
indeed times of trial to the Church 
and of testing to its teaching. They 
involve great peril to much that is 
held precious, but they also hold great 
promise. We were horrified at the 
excisions made in the vineyard by the 
pruning-knife, but the purple clusters 
of autumn vindicated the method. The 
Church has always been most aggres- 
sively active in the days of doctrinal 
and institutional reconstruction. In 
vineyard and orchard the fruit always 
grows on the new wood. All the 
swiftest advances, both in material 
and moral progress, are made in 
analytic rather than synthetic periods. 
The heretics of to-day are very often 
the prophets of to-morrow. The no- 
blest discoveries of power have always 
been made by the men who bravely 
broke with tradition in loyalty to 
truth. The ways of the Spirit are 
never static, but always dynamic. It 



94 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

is in such times that the creative 
Spirit of God is moving on the face of 
the waters and commanding from the 
chaos of our confused thinking the 
apparition of a new heaven and a new 
earth. 

I looked: aside the~dust-cloud rolled, 
The Waster seemed the builder too^ 

Upspringing from the ruined Old, 
I saw the New. 

'Twas but the ruin of the bad — 
The wasting of the wrong and ill; 

Whate'er of good the old time had 
Was living still. 



Take heart! the Waster builds again — 
A charmed life old Goodness hath; 

The tares may perish, but the grain 
Is not for death. 1 

Surely, such a time should see a 
renascence of the divine art of preach- 
ing. Certainly, the sermon does not 
to-day hold a high place in popular 
esteem. Some phases of church life 

1 J. G. Whittier, "The Reformer." 



AND PREACHING 95 

have doubtless assisted in this de- 
cadence of the pulpit. The compli- 
cated social and secular organization 
of the modern church often seeks for 
pastor a man of the "promoter* ' type, 
the skillful organizer and strong exec- 
utive. Another type of congregation 
calls for a gentlemanly usher, cleverly 
adroit in all the etiquette of the sanc- 
tuary and of society. There is great 
danger that such a ministry will cease 
to be a Voice. The preacher who 
surrenders to any secular theory of 
his calling will soon become a mere 
phonograph to parrotlike repeat a set 
of conventional opinions. He will 
preach what he is expected to preach. 
Like the parson described in Tenny- 
son's "Northern Farmer/ ' 

I 'eered 'urn a bummin awaay like a buzzard 
clock ower my 'ead .... 
An' I thowt a said whot a]owt to a' said, an 
I coomed awaay. 

He is like a barrel organ on whose 



96 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 

cylinder are pegged out a few tunes 
born of homiletic tradition. Give such 
a man a new conception of the Bible, 
let him feel it throbbing with human 
life and thrilling with a divine mes- 
sage, let its message become no archaic 
deposit carefully handed down from 
generation to generation, but a living 
experience wrought in his own soul, and 
he may become like the great church 
organ with its countless stops and 
keys, through which the whole world 
of holy harmony and melody sleeping 
in the air of history and life can be 
expressed. The preacher of to-morrow 
must be a true prophet of God, trans- 
lating the common life of the world 
into the terms of the Spirit; he will be 
an inspired herald of the kingdom of 
heaven upon earth. 



OCT 19 1912 



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